[New-bugs-announce] [issue19388] Inflated download counts

[Dustin Oprea]

New submission from Dustin Oprea:

Noah recommended that I approach the distutils mailing list to report a potential PyPI problem. I can't seem to find a webpage for the distutils list, so I'm posting an official bug.

I have a few packages on PyPI, and I often find my counts immediately taking hold, and, for the more useful projects, skyrocketing. However, I recently started a service that requires membership. In the last month, PyPI reports 3000 downloads of the client, yet Google Analytics only reports a handful of visits to the website. I have even less membership signups (as expected, so soon after launch). Why are the download counts so inflated? Obviously, they're very misleading and limited if they don't ignore spurious visitors (like robots).

What has to be done to get this to be accurate?

I've included two screenshots of PyPI and GA.

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assignee: eric.araujo
components: Distutils
messages: 201234
nosy: dsoprea, eric.araujo, tarek
priority: normal
severity: normal
status: open
title: Inflated download counts
type: enhancement
Added file: http://bugs.python.org/file32351/inflated_counts.zip

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Python tracker <report at bugs.python.org>
<http://bugs.python.org/issue19388>
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